The present invention relates generally to cooking equipment and, in a preferred embodiment thereof, more particularly provides deep fat frying apparatus having an improved cooking fluid filtration system.
The frying in commercial cooking facilities of various food items such as french fries, breaded chicken and fish and the like is conventionally performed using fryer structures that typically comprise at least two large capacity metal frypots operatively supported within an upper portion of a suitable housing. Each of the frypots has a heated upper portion, in which the food is actually fried in a cooking fluid such as oil or melted lard, and an elongated, unheated "cold well" portion which depends from the upper frypot portion and is designed to receive and retain food bits that inevitably fall from the frier racks. The relatively cooler temperature of the cooking fluid in the unheated wells tends to prevent the fallen food particles from burning and thereby unduly hastening the need to replace the cooking fluid in the frypots with a fresh supply.
It is well known that the useful life of a given batch of cooking fluid may be further extended by periodically draining the oil, filtering the particulate food matter from the drained fluid, and then returning the cleansed fluid to its frypot for further food frying use. Heretofore, the equipment needed to effect this very advantageous filtration process has required a considerable amount of additional operation and/or storage floor space beyond that occupied by the fryer housing, the housing floor space normally being only somewhat greater than the vertically projected floor area of the large capacity frypots.
As an example, it has been conventional practice to position the filtration and associated pumping equipment in a separate floor mounted filtration housing built onto one side of the frypot housing. Not only does this require a significant amount of additional floor space, which is usually at a high premium in most commercial cooking facilities such as fast food restaurants, but also inhibits the ability to add additional frypot sections to the existing frypot housing should business expand or frying needs otherwise increase.
It is accordingly an object of the present invention to provide deep fat frying apparatus, having an improved cooking fluid filtration system, which eliminates or minimizes the above-mentioned and other problems, limitations and disadvantages typically associated with conventional deep fat frying structures and their floor space-consuming fluid filtration systems.